Rev. angel Kyodo williams

"love and justice are not two. without inner change, there can be no outer change; without collective change, no change matters."

Apes Will Rise | Rebellion For The Heart


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Just as London was beginning to be set ablaze by Blackberries, I was bracing myself for the current Hollywood reboot of Planet of the Apes. The 2001 remake starring Mark Wahlberg left me mortally wounded, having claimed itself a "revisioning" of the original story and movie, it managed to not only leave every racist/colorist myth in place but it was also elevated it to a spiritual plane by being robed in pseudo-Himalayan garb so that the apes were a cabal of ill-compassionate, slave-owning monks and priests. It was one of only two movies

I've ever walked out on with my only regret being that, at the time, I still harbored some naive hope that it would play out differently than it appeared, such that I suffered through it for far too long. Hence my as-yet-unhealed scar to this day. In my defense, my wariness was not solely the product of ancient wounding. The earliest trailers for the movie depicted the apes in a decidedly more ominous tone. They were clearly no different than the "copycat criminal element" that has rained mayhem down upon London. My mind conjures up images of Dean Winters, who personifies Mayhem in the ticklish Allstate commercials. Rather than one intrusive black-faced raccoon inhabiting the roof, there are thousands of carbon copy black Dean Winters with hoodies and cellphones coming out in droves to inhabit every imagined safe corner of the UK's big cities. It was all well and good when it was just the downtrodden Tottenham, home to a similar outbreak in 1985. Police and politicos swore it was isolated to the disenfranchised few using the death of Mark Duggan as an excuse to spruce up their wardrobes. It wasn't conceivable that it was a spark in the tinderbox of social unrest that lines the overcoat of the world. There's been much commentary about how caught off guard the UK prime minister David Cameron was by the unrest. What this conveys to me is that he is sleeping through a revolution. The world as we know it is in a revolution. Literally, a wave of discontent is encircling the globe country by country, region by region, both dismantling and reorganizing lines of class, culture, and caste. Who "the People" change at every turn—indeed, in the movie, they aren't even people, but they are the People—the People are the shape-shifting stewards of our humanity who rise up cyclically to counter the forces that would have us tread backward in our evolution by vying to protect the status quo. They are slaves, farmers, migrants, workers the world over that see the abundance of earth's resources hoarded by privilege so rewrite the lines of distribution to carry us one step closer to achieving humanity. It is invariably a painful process as it meets with resistance borne of fear. But it is inevitable. We are a forward-propelled species. Stagnation is death. Oscar Grant, Khaled Said, Mark Duggan: Unjustifiable deaths are the symbolic awakenings of consciousness. The cathartic cognitive break brought on by the disruption of meaning-making. We can no longer make meaning out of the conditions we find ourselves in. We're prone to miss this moment as a revolution because its form is markedly different than what we typically look for. There are no leaders, no central figures. And with humbling executions of grace, there is comparatively little violence. Even from Mayhem, the gangs, guerillas, and gorillas. And still...this revolution beckons and calls for our evolution. It is:
  • begging for equality
  • pining for justice
  • yearning to be returned home to the human heart

and we will not rest until we get there. Our consumer-driven culture has wrenched the vitality out of life so that it no longer matters that—as the prescient King noted—I may not get there with you. I'm willing to take the blow and the fall if it means you'll get there. And like Caesar, I'll exercise compassion for the unwilling participants of a system in which the only true enemy is oppression. But someone has to get there. So apes will rise, and we will fight our way across bridges and through blockades to return to the place where our eyes can survey the land in safety. Where our minds can rest easy and our breath can rise and fall in freedom. The place where no one has to come to save us from being lost amongst our own kind. —yours in truth, aKw

dedicated to all the People that strive on behalf of our humanity.

angel Kyodo Williams, the "change angel," is Founder Emeritus of Center for Transformative Change. She now serves as a Senior Fellow and Director of Vision. A social visionary and leading voice for transformative social change, she is the author of the critically-acclaimed Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living With Fearlessness and Grace.

Blog: new Dharma: live, love & lead from the heart

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Web: http://library.angelkyodowilliams.com

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Comments

  1. Dear Ms Williams

    I came across your site because I was looking to find out more about breathing in meditation (I notice that when I meditate, my breathing is almost imperceptible) and whether my experience of it, is normal.

    But it’s interesting that I should find one of your essays features my place of birth: Tottenham, which has experienced restlessness for as long as I’ve known it. And disturbances always seems to begin there, before it spreads nationwide. The latest, is that the area is now being gentrified. I no longer live there but I visit the place every year and last year when I visited, I was shocked at the number of new building estates, how Broadwater Farm will soon be knocked down; how shops that have been there ever since are not having their leases renewed by the local council. Places, such as the local library, where the black community have fought to have named after a leading heroes (I’m referring to the Marcus Garvey centre), is having to ‘fight’ again as the council is seeking to change the name!

    But what is even more soul destroying, those who live in council flats are being moved to similar places far away and outside from the capital. The council have successfully done this with another ‘riot area’ Brixton (Spike Lee commented on this as well) and Hackney. In other words, you can live in the area, only if you can afford to.

    I know change is a fact of life but I pray, as well as meditate, that if there is to be a ‘revolution’, at least the residents should not be denied the opportunity of being allowed to participate as opposed to the status-quo slyly, and quickly, making sure that the change they are determined to have, takes place without a hitch.

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